Tuesday, October 16, 2012

I want to update everyone on a few of the things that have been happening with our sites
in the last few weeks. It's been exciting!

Alaska Airline Fuelers:

SeaTac Fuelers, who
work for one of Alaska Airline's contract companies (ASIG), may be going on strike because of public safety concerns, despite being non-unionized. One of the fuelers,
Alex Popescu was indefinitely suspended for speaking out about the safety
concerns, which include “everything from trucks with soft or no brakes,
leaking fuel hoses, trucks that spark when they're being driven when they're
hauling fuel.” After Alex’s suspension the workers took a vote and unanimously
decided that they would be striking if the safety concerns were not addressed. Marianne, Stephen and I (in addition to our site placements and our UCC pastors Lauren Cannon and Mike Denton) participated in a
march on ASIG offices at SeaTac, which was covered by a lot of the major news channels. Even though a little time has passed, the
issue isn’t going away and it is still unclear what will happen. Below is some
of the media coverage of the event- you can even see the three of us holding a
large sign and walking in the Q13 coverage!

This is an awesome music video supporting marriage equality.
I’m guessing that a lot of people have seen this music video but did you know
that it was filmed (in part) at All Pilgrims Church (the church we live in)?! We were all pretty
excited when it came out earlier this month. All four of the interns are in the
background of the scene with sparklers- you might just have to believe us on
that though because we can’t quite be sure if we recognize ourselves in the
crowd. Maybe Stephen though. He’s tall.

One of my main projects in
the last few weeks has been getting in touch with congregations to see if they
would be interested in hosting a training on economic justice. It is a very
cool program provided by Rev. David Bloom that can run from a single, one hour session,
to multiple sessions and provides a new way to read both the bible and the
newspaper. It leaves individuals and congregations with specific actions that
they can take based on what they learned in the class.

If this sounds interesting to
you please let me know! I would be happy to coordinate with anyone who wants to
bring this to a congregation in King County- and you’d be helping me out.